The Innovators 2007

If there's an ethos that ties technologists together, it's the notion that the status quo poses far greater risk than not pushing forward. Among some of this year's Innovators there's an almost militant insistence that banks not shirk.

"Innovation or death" is the motto of Pete Cittadini, the CEO of Actuate, one of 2007's most innovative people. Looked at another way, it has been observed by Peter Drucker that "the best way to predict the future is to create it," a sentiment the 25 most advanced people, companies and technologies in BTN's ranking certainly share. Those who do not embrace new technologies that effect positive, if not disruptive change risk being swept aside by more progressive competitors.

This is a list of success stories in the industry, and so a certain degree of brio is to be expected. But there are lessons here for all players. The Innovators show how an aggressive, well-conceived technology strategy can boost revenue through untapped avenues, lower costs through operational efficiencies and differentiate a financial institution from its competitors in the minds of customers and investors.

It's key testimony to why long-range, creative thinking about ways in which to redefine the technology landscape must have equal footing with the short-term drive to hit annual financial and market share targets, all the while serving the interests of customers.

Equally impressive as the financial results this year's Innovators have enjoyed is the breadth of their technological advances. The technological strides featured in the ranking include next-generation payments and mobile banking, improved data analysis, more sophisticated credit risk assessment, open-source-based business intelligence, advanced remote-deposit capture, branch automation, regulatory compliance, core banking, and Internet security.

Of course, innovation in the financial services industry continues at a breakneck pace, and institutions are eager to put these advancements to good use. The Innovators in this issue - stand outs in a crowded field - have stories particularly worth telling. In all cases, what's striking is not just how great an impact these 25 companies have had on their customers and the industry over the past year, but the extent to which they light a path forward. That, in the end, is true innovation.

The Innovators 2007

Click on a link below to be taken directly to each profile.

  1. Jeff Yabuki - President and CEO, Fiserv
  2. Bank of America
  3. Tripp Rackley - CEO, Firethorn
  4. RBC Financial Group
  5. Louis Hernandez - Chairman and CEO, Open Solutions Inc.
  6. CheckFree's Web RXP
  7. PrimeRevenue
  8. Frank Martire - President and CEO, Metavante Corp.
  9. Art Coviello - President, RSA, the security division of EMC
  10. John Woolbright - SVP and CTO, Synovus
  11. Oracle
  1. June Felix - General Manager, Global Banking Solutions and Strategy, IBM Corp.
  2. Panini
  3. Michael R. Cote - President & CEO, SecureWorks
  4. Pete Cittadini - CEO, Actuate Corp.
  5. Actimize's Employee Fraud Solution
  6. IdenTrust
  7. Wincor Nixdorf's Bulk Check Deposit
  8. NCR
  9. mFoundry
  10. VSoft
  11. WSFS Financial Corp.
  12. Verint
  13. Harland's CreditQuest
  14. Bottomline Technologies

1. JEFF YABUKI - CEO, Fiserv

Age: 47
Claim to fame: Landed CheckFree in a $4.4 billion cash deal
Compensation: $4.4 million (2006)

Fiserv chose Jeff Yabuki as its new CEO in November 2005. In early 2006, the company was named to the Fortune 500, but the CEO did not bask in the limelight. Rather, he embarked on a corporate strategy to offer a platform-wide suite of products, Fiserv 2.0, vowing to move away from a profit-center, business-unit model to a customer-driven mission. "My drive and motivation is helping our employees, our associates, our clients and their constituencies be the very best-to create a platform where people can be special," Yabuki says. Clients are integral to innovation and design, he contends. "In the end, it's [about] what the clients have and what they want."

Giving clients what they want isn't always easy-or cheap. Fiserv's recent $4.4 billion purchase of CheckFree, a deal expected to close by next month, is the latest in a line of 140 other acquisitions since its founding in 1986. The moves are paying off: income from continuing operations grew to $333.7 million in the first nine months of 2007, up 4.1 percent from the similar 2006 period, while earnings per share for continuing operations rose 9.4 percent to $1.97. During the same nine-month period, total revenues increased 9.3 percent to $2.54 billion year over year. Fiserv's client list exceeds 18,000 institutions, as well as self-insured employers.

The greatest challenge in reshaping the company has been focusing the richness of the technologies it offers, from core systems to fraud detection and prevention. "Which of your children is your favorite?" Yabuki asks rhetorically. "We needed honest assessments, with the goal of taking our position as a world-class provider of integrated solutions and helping customers become best-of-class."

Until recently, the company's acquisitions remained "highly independent, often competing against each other in a similar space," says Christine Barry, research director at Aite Group. Yabuki's Fiserv 2.0 strategy better integrates these pieces, and she believes that the vision is succeeding. A case in point is the company's acquisition of BancIntelligence, which provides online access to bank financial and market analysis and strategic development tools. And its sale of Fiserv Investment Support Services shows an intention to "deepen vertically into core banking," says Barry. Gartner research director Don Free agrees that Fiserv is shifting to a more centralized model. "In the context of core-banking systems, the integrated financial-services platform strategy is long overdue, but foreign to the pre-Yabuki corporate strategy," Free explains. In that era, the "primary edict was 'make your margins' and not one of teamwork across individual business lines," he says. Free expects Fiserv to eventually implement core systems that are "platform- and database-agnostic."

Yabuki says "more and more technology is centered on helping individuals become more self-sufficient, to disintermediate the channels needed to do tasks," whether downloading music, listening to books or scheduling bills. Credit, debit, checks and cash - "all those kinds of transfers of value will change," he predicts. (JR)

Return to top

2. BANK OF AMERICA

Who's driving innovation: Barbara Desoer
Noteworthy: Under her direction, the "Keep the Change" debit-card program netted $400 million in new deposits
Annual technology spend: $6.6 billion (TowerGroup estimate)

Bank of America has a mammoth technology budget estimated at $6.6 billion and a management team and culture focused on deploying technology that produces business results. That's impressive, but the bank has a powerful incentive to pursue this strategy across its sprawling footprint in the United States.

The U.S. is a technologically advanced market, which makes the rollout and adoption of new technologies possible on a large scale, and the potential payoff from those adoptions even bigger. When one considers that BofA derives 94 percent of its revenue from the U.S. and has the largest branch and ATM networks in the country, it's pretty clear why the bank should, even needs, to pursue technological efficiencies and operational excellence. "It's so scaled and so concentrated in the U.S., and it is very driven to take advantage of that," says Jim Eckenrode, managing director at TowerGroup. "It's really a 'shame on them' if they don't."

So far there's nothing the least bit shameful in BofA's approach (The bank declined to reveal its technology budget; Eckenrode provided the estimate). The institution, led by chief technology and operations officer Barbara Desoer, has pushed the envelope on a number of fronts, marrying operational efficiencies and top-line revenue growth-something not often pulled off. Take, for instance, the rollout last year of "Keep the Change," a program that allows consumers to save while they spend by "rounding up" debit-card transactions to the nearest dollar and putting the spare change into a savings account.

After about a year in place, the program had netted four million new customers saving $400 million; not only that, it generated more than 800,000 new checking accounts and a million new savings accounts. As Eckenrode explains, the technology involved is not especially complex, and other banks could certainly ape the program. But BofA's massive scale in the U.S. makes the program an enormous, ongoing winner for BofA, no matter how other banks respond.

Desoer's team also has led progressive efforts in the online arena. BofA has 22 million active online banking subscribers, accounting for one-third of the U.S. online banking market and two-thirds of the online bill-pay market. That's important, considering that online customers are 27 percent more profitable than traditional customers, with deposit balances 15 percent higher and loan balances 28 percent higher.

Red Gillen, a senior analyst at Celent, has been impressed with BofA's moves into the mobile-banking space. Its decision to go with a mobile browser-instead of data-constrained SMS text-messaging and more expensive application software-was a bold risk, allowing the bank to offer the product in March ahead of rivals. It provides immediate cost savings, he says, since it keeps mobile-phone users out of the more expensive call-center environment and, more importantly, acclimates customers to the mobile environment for the future rollout of mobile payments.

Without question, Desoer's work has contributed to the bank's strong performance over most of the last year. The $1.5 trillion-asset institution enjoyed a 28 percent increase in profit in 2006, rising to $21.13 billion, and was on track for another stellar year in 2007-until the credit markets roiled the industry. In the third quarter, BofA reported $1.45 billion in third-quarter trading losses that caused its overall profit to tumble 32 percent. (MS)

Return to top

3. TRIPP RACKLEY - CEO, Firethorn

Tripp Rackley is a believer and a doer. "If you can dream it up, the technology is there to support it," says Brady "Tripp" Rackley III, chairman and CEO of Firethorn, the Atlanta-based mobile banking and payments technology company launched in November 2006. The privately held company has partnered with AT&T, CheckFree, and, most recently, Verizon Wireless to implement its Mobile Consumer Wallet, a downloadable app for mobile banking. BancorpSouth, Wachovia, SunTrust, Regions Bank and Synovus have chosen the platform.

The technology can be branded by financial institutions, and it allows users to access and manage financial transactions using a single password. "Tripp and his team at Firethorn have been aggressive in meeting our timelines and working harmoniously to ensure our product launch would proceed as scheduled," notes Lisa L. White, senior director and svp of Synovus Innovative Solutions.

"This is a very nascent space," adds Jim Straight, Verizon Wireless svp of consumer product. "It's like herding cats to get it going, and Tripp is very good at herding cats." Firethorn "has a very good approach to the marketplace," Straight continues, focusing on "one-time sign in, useability, and security-a real must."

Rackley, 37, describes himself as a "white board addict" with four roller boards in his office that he "covers and erases and covers again" between 6:30 and 9 a.m. "I use color printer paper and sharpies when I'm not on a white board-I'm just too methodical to design on a napkin. I take well over a year papering the walls, piece by piece-a ton of time conceptualizing before I externalize it, minimizing redesign."

Mobile payments are only the first step in allowing customers to conduct the full array of financial transactions anywhere and anytime, Rackley contends. "When new horizontal technologies are introduced, the tendency is to transfer the existing platform," he says. "We're trying to create a new platform and apply a new experience."

Family and community are central to this entrepreneur's life. He coaches both his daughters' soccer teams and teaches classes at his church. "I don't sleep that much," Rackley admits, and he's not a big fan of sit-down lunches. "Driving home from church my wife often reminds me: 'This isn't your team-you have three kids, and they have to eat on a schedule,'" he laughs. "You have to strike a balance. Business is not worth it if that's all there is to it. The family dinner is just as important." This philosophy permeates Firethorn, where evenings with the family are the norm and the CFO leaves early to coach his son's football team. (JR)

Return to top

4. RBC FINANCIAL GROUP

What's driving innovation: Working with Canadian telecom company TELUS, RBC developed wireless broadband links to connect with claims adjustors in the field
Noteworthy: Centralized in-house support for a Canadian mobile-user base
Biggest advantage: fleet of insurance adjustors have mobile access to client data and can issue documents and payments while meeting with clients in the field

Getting quickly to the scene of an accident is job one for the police, medical services and then the insurance-claims adjustor. This is especially true for agents of RBC Financial Group, whose wired workforce are becoming first responders making on-the-spot decisions when a customer is in need.

This kind of innovation is at the forefront of fast, mobile financial services and critical now for enterprises wanting to make adjustments and decisions quickly while still keeping a large number of agents in the field, where the customers are. It's of note that a Canadian bank is linking its back-office insurance operations directly to its adjustors, who use a network card slotted into their laptops. The program, Wireless Road Advisor, is still in its pilot phase. Each of the 27 road adjusters handle six assignments per day, covering a total of 32,000 customers.

The idea, says RBC spokesman André Roberts, is to create a mobile internal user base that ranges across Canada and is linked back to a centralized support structure. The system uses Webex technology to give support staff remote access to the adjustor's laptop; RBC implemented IBM's MQe messaging and queuing product on an iSeries platform, building a Java wrapper to enable communication between the mobile app and MQe. Because the tool requires a good deal of bandwidth, RBC's telecom partner Telus built on a multiplexing Evolution Data-Optimized standard. EVDO can score up to 2.4 megs per second in one iteration, 3.1 megs per second on another. Roberts says the Wireless Road Advisor's EVDO is a 10-fold improvement on 1X technology, which is a 2.5 or 3G mobile protocol.

All of which is fine. The thing is, it's creating value. RBC has moved to make its adjusters faster, more efficient, and, most importantly, more able to take action in the moment. Wireless Road Advisor connects with its move by providing scheduling and optimization tools for adjusters using SERVICEPower software from the U.K. vendor, and, on the life side, building a product that can be underwritten and bound online in as little as 15 minutes. As TowerGroup analyst Cynthia Saccocia points out in a report on mobile technology in insurance, the industry's overall spending on mobile technology is growing 18 percent a year, at about $25 million in 2006 alone.

RBC's insurance business is among the top 10 largest in Canada. The firm booked C$3.3 billion (U.S. $3.3 billion) in insurance net interest income last year, with total revenue increasing by C$78 million the year before. Net income for global insurance at the group was up 69 percent in third-quarter 2007 over the year before. "This new technology is geared toward improving the overall client experience and will help us further assist clients through a potentially difficult time," Roberts says.

When an adjuster receives a call, he goes to the scene and files all reports on the spot. This means gathering all the necessary documents while still on the scene with a customer. As he puts it, the firm is most valuable to the client at that time-while things are still fresh. Better claims service, particularly on-the-spot adjuster service, helps control costs as well. Cars get repaired in days rather than weeks. "This immediate response improves the client experience in a difficult and often confusing time," Roberts says. "Settling an insurance claim is the moment of truth." (MD)

Return to top

5. LOUIS HERNANDEZ - CEO and Chairman, Open Solutions Inc.

After Louis Hernandez Jr. came on board as CEO in 1999, fast-growing Open Solutions Inc. gained a rep for a tough-love, have-it-our-way approach to M&A integration. OSI routinely nudged banking clients gained from core-system acquisitions into adopting its modern, open-architecture products by cutting off enhancements to legacy systems.

But when OSI itself was on the other side of the merger equation - the formerly NASDAQ-traded software firm was taken private in a $1.3 billion buyout by The Carlyle Group and Providence Equity Partners a year ago-the edict was quite different. Instead of change, it was carry on. "It's more like the early days," says Hernandez, 41, of his Glastonbury, CT, firm's new freedom from quarterly income pressures and SOX headaches. "It feels like a rejuvenated team that gets to participate in both the excitement of growing into our next phase and the economic benefits."

Hernandez, a California native, earned $22 million from the private-equity deal. But he was no stranger to technology startups, he put in time at several after a stint as a consultant at Price Waterhouse. Since 1999 he has led OSI from $12 million in revenue to nearly half a billion by preaching open-systems architecture to banks.

With close to 2,100 employees and more than 1,200 core-banking clients on the roster, OSI has ballooned into the nation's fifth-largest core provider. The credibility that comes with heft should serve OSI well in the coming years. Large numbers of institutions are expected to transition to service-oriented architecture to meet the demands of modern banking: online and mobile banking, automated processing and customer-centric business models. The company's primary business is still in upgrading the under-$1 billion-asset community-bank and credit-union set with its best-of-suite TCBS (The Complete Banking Solution) product. "Only Fiserv PCS and Harland Phoenix have cores that are on as modern an architecture," says Celent senior analyst Bart Narter.

Domestic vendor competition for bank-system modernization is getting tougher, as international heavyweights i-flex (which offers the FLEXCUBE system and is majority owned by Oracle) and Temenos (in partnership with Metavante) start gaining traction with U.S. banks. But if there's anyone who likes competition, it's Hernandez. He's a soccer player in a local club-sponsored league, plus he's a co-founder and owner of an upstart women's professional soccer league set to launch next year. (GF)

Return to top

6. CHECKFREE'S WEB RXP

Biggest advantage: Industry-leading user interface increases loyalty and retention
Number of users: More than 2,000 financial institutions offer Web RXP to their online users
Noteworthy: Customer rating of overall ease of use went from 88 percent to 92 percent after Web RXP was implemented

CheckFree CEO Peter Kight may have spent much of 2007 working with Fiserv on the $4.4 billion cash deal to sell the bill- presentment, payment and ACH behemoth he founded in 1981, but his usability gurus were hard at work fine-tuning the features and design of the next generation of CheckFree's online bill-payment engine, Web RXP. The result, according to analysts and CheckFree's own frequent customer polls, was strong success, with significant lift on at least 15 measures of end-user satisfaction, says Chuck Carr, product manager for CheckFree's business-to-consumer products group.

"CheckFree has made significant investments into the user interface," says Aite Group's Gwenn Bezard. "That's the main areas of focus for banks-everyone is trying to have the best UI. ...It sounds mundane, but it takes a lot of time and resources and it's not something many vendors or online banks are very good at."

Bezard is right; the Ajax-enabled "payment assistant" that CheckFree considers the heart of the new user experience does sound mundane. But a demo on the CheckFree Website shows more clearly how having appropriate past-payment dates, amounts and calendar entries appearing unprompted at the decision point can increase confidence and speed transaction time. "The fact that we're more proactively presenting information that helps the user's decision about when they should schedule a payment and for how much just creates a much more streamlined end-user experience," Carr says.

Web RXP also helps banks increase the number of customers who receive their bills online through the bank's bill-presentment service by clearly showing which bills are available electronically. This is no small matter. SunTrust Banks found that customers who receive at least three e-bills per month have a 78 percent lower attrition rate and were 86 percent more profitable than offline customers. The implementation of the Web RXP version prompted a strong initial boost in the number of customers signing up for ebills, says Sarah Overcash, SunTrust avp and online bill-pay product manager, with nearly 30 percent of the bank's active online base currently receiving at least one e-bill.

SunTrust is a happy client, but it's small potatoes compared to the $170 million in revenue that Bank of America contributed toward CheckFree's $972 million in revenue in fiscal 2007. Market rumors claim that BofA's contemplation of bringing some of its payment processing in-house played a role in Kight's decision to sell his baby, but analysts say that CheckFree's 2,000-plus other customers, virtual domination of the online-payments market, and renowned skill at integrating acquisitions, made the 30 percent premium that Fiserv will pay on CheckFree's stock worth the price. (RS)

Return to top

7. PRIME REVENUE

What's driving innovation: Banks and corporates want to free up working capital; suppliers want to speed up payment with real-time invoicing views and to more easily establish B2B financing.

Noteworthy: Grew throughput transactions on platform 227 percent; volume of $18.5 billion on annualized basis
Customers: Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, BMO Capital Markets, IBM Global Financing, National City Bank, Nordea, Macquarie

Global trade may have turned the world flat and bridged the oceans, but the financial-supply chain behind it is still a mule moving through the Himalayas.

Establishing electronic business-to-business payments or financing, often in multi-currency arrangements and latent, paper-based invoice presentment, is a relatively nascent development that many international companies are still trying to grasp-and what banks are trying to improve by partnering with supply-chain-finance platforms like that of Atlanta-based PrimeRevenue. "Banks are looking at how they play a significant role as more and more business... is not within [a company's] four walls," says PrimeRevenue CEO Joe Juliano. "What complications does that cause the large corporate and how can the banks participate?"

A Web-based, supply-chain-finance platform is more than just a quick-pay invoice channel, although it reduces the calendar period for a 60-day B2B settlement down to 48 hours. It can also empower financing arrangements that improve the working-capital ratios of both firms. PrimeRevenue serves as a software go-between atop a company's ERP or invoice system, established as a direct connection between two companies or through a financial institution. Buying organizations upload information from their accounts-payable systems, and suppliers can log in through PrimeRevenue and view amounts, payment dates and, most importantly, receivables.

In a 2006 report by Aberdeen Research, analysts found almost 90 percent of companies with more than $1 billion in revenue can't budget cash flow for their supplier relationships. A Gartner study last year also found that company treasuries dwindle away three-fourths of resources compiling and crunching data around transactions.

Founded just four years ago, privately held PrimeRevenue has garnered a heavy-hitting client lineup of commercial banks-Bank of America, National City, BMO Capital Markets-plus a newly announced relationship as Morgan Stanley's supply-chain-finance platform to its corporate-buyer clients. PrimeRevenue declined to reveal its annual revenues. "A commercial bank creates transactional velocity, and they package investment vehicles together," says Juliano. "What's unique about Morgan Stanley is their ability to create funding structures...beyond a balance-sheet lending opportunity."

PrimeRevenue expects a 10-fold increase this year in transaction volumes, spurred by partner deals (IBM Global Financing) and compatibility with payment standards (ACH, SWIFT, et al) to draw multinationals that want to consolidate banking relationships and avoid proprietary bank formats. "It's a combination of the banks and large corporates that need a standard offering," says Juliano. (GF)

Return to top

8. FRANK MARTIRE - CEO, Metavante

Age: 58
Claim to fame: Inking ground-breaking joint venture with Temenos
Clients: 91 of the largest 100 U.S. banks

In October of 2007, the proposed spinoff of Metavante from parent Marshall & Ilsley had been six months in the works and the roadshow for the IPO, scheduled for November 2, was about to begin. At the time, Frank Martire, Metavante's CEO, was a bit frustrated that the demands of the tour had kept him from meeting with clients and customers as much as he likes, but pleased that only about a dozen of his company's 5,500 people were focused on the public offering. "As for the rest of the organization, we're telling them to stay focused on the customers, and that's worked well. Clients have been amazed to find out that we're even going public," he says.

That tight focus on the customer-and innovating for them-is Martire's guiding principle. "We have to continue to enhance products, create products and acquire products," he says. "We have to be out in front to position our clients to be out in front. And since you don't know exactly how the industry will evolve, you have to offer as many features and as much functionality as possible."

Martire assumed the CEO post at Metavante, the banking and payments technology subsidiary of Marshall & Ilsley, in 2003, but this past year has been especially busy with innovation. Metavante, with $1.5 billion in annual revenue, $160 million in annual income and 91 of the top 100 U.S. banks as customers, has pushed deeper into online payments, mobile payments, and reengineered its health-savings-account portal.

But one of the biggest and boldest bets he made was teaming up with Geneva-based Temenos Group. The agreement brings together Temenos' proven core-banking platform (proven at least in Europe) with Metavante's deep expertise developing products and services for deposit, loan and trust systems, image-based and check processing, electronic- funds transfer, consumer healthcare payments and electronic billing and payment in the U.S.

A hodge-podge of laws and jurisdictions, complex regulations and a stubborn reliance on paper checks has helped make the large U.S. banking market a "fortress" against foreign core-banking platforms, according to Celent senior analyst Bart Narter. Historically, U.S. banks have simply not had the confidence in overseas systems to use them, but there is a need for U.S. banks to begin migrating from their legacy core-banking platforms.

Under the agreement, Metavante will distribute the Temenos core-banking platform, TCB, in the U.S., with Temenos retaining royalties on license and maintenance fees, outsourcing fees and professional-services revenues. Narter describes the arrangement as a true "win-win" for the each side- and the industry. Its first component release will be a customer information-management system scheduled for the second quarter of 2008.

Martire says joint ventures can be tricky. "It's always better to own 51 percent, but when you're working with a quality company, some of these partnerships can work well," he says. (MS)

Return to top

9. ART COVIELLO - President of RSA

Experience: 30 years
Claim to fame: The authentication solution
RSA's value to EMC: $2.1 billion

It was the brightest spotlight imaginable for Art Coviello, a high-tech executive who was already a pretty public person. His company, RSA, the de facto brand for online authentication, had just gotten acquired-and his next move would play a major role in determining the street cred and ultimate success of the new corporate marriage.

That's when Coviello drew on his three decades of business and tech savvy to make an indelible mark on the combination of EMC and RSA Security, a now year-old union that's vaulted both brands to new heights in the white-hot, risky and highly scrutinized game of e-commerce security.

"There was lots of talk going around about whether Art would stick around after the EMC acquisition," says Christopher Young, vp and general manager of the identity and access assurance group of RSA, the Security Division of EMC. "He did the opposite of what you might think. He dug in, and that's why the senior management hung around. We had a much smoother transition as a result."

That smooth transition, driven by Coviello's steady hand and buoyed by the respect he enjoys in the IT security industry, was more than enough to maintain a winning streak of 20 percent year-over-year earnings growth in each quarter since the acquisition last fall.

That growth was driven by a four-figure boost in new customers. The firm now has more than 27,000 customers around the world and signed up about 1,500 new customers in the second quarter of 2007 alone-a group that includes banks and financial institutions in locations as varied as Japan, China, Pakistan and Fresno. Other recent client wins have included Wachovia, Bank of the West and CashEdge, among others.

These firms are attracted to the wide range of security products developed under Coviello's tutelage. In 2007, the now EMC-backed RSA introduced products that provide information risk management, anti-Trojan and crimeware, two- and three-factor authentication for ordinary computing devices, and a number of other rollouts.

"With an acquisition, you've got change in systems, policies, methodologies and process. There are things you have to fight through until things settle down," says Coviello, who increased RSA's revenues to $310 million-plus in 2005 from $25 million in 1995, a time in which the firm became acknowledged as the standard for authentication.

Much of this product and client expansion has come through a combination of Coviello's leadership and the shrewd mix of the firm's information storage and security expertise. That's leading to a new generation of products that offer authentication based on sophisticated knowledge of a client's users and their specific risk. Coviello credits the addition to EMC as not only providing additional tech and business knowledge, but leverage in RSA's 2007 round of acquisitions. "Not only did EMC not get in the way, they added a substantial amount of value," he says. (JA)

Return to top

10. JOHN WOOLBRIGHT - SVP and CTO, Synovus

Age: 38
Claim to fame: Slashing third-party costs by $1 million
Biggest achievement: Implementation of SOA

Any vision you can't implement is a hallucination." So says John Woolbright, svp and CTO of $33 billion-asset Synovus. So it should come as no surprise that he puts a premium on collaboration to get things done in today's complex IT environment.

Business partners must understand each other's needs and limitations and work together toward solutions, he says; that means he works closely with technology vendors such as Metavante, S1, Corillian, Forum and xAware to coordinate initiatives, develop joint goals and establish architectural principles and integration strategies.

"I spend a lot of time working with business partners, and thinking about what's coming to market," Woolbright says. "How will it map into our IT infrastructure? What do we need to do to modify our infrastructure and fill in the gaps? How do we adapt technology to support business processes?"

Working with these business partners has become easier since Synovus virtualized its infrastructure and then designed and implemented a service-oriented architecture on top of it. Virtualization allows for greater control. When an organization virtualizes an operating system, its applications, configuration settings and other elements can be rolled out anywhere in the organization and the programmer does not need to know the network-specific details. "We can make new changes with incredible agility," Woolbright says.

Now, with the virtualization complete and the SOA in place, Woolbright can turn to Metavante, for instance, and say, "I need you to have this kind of plug to fit into our outlet. . ...A lot of places have an SOA, but how we implemented the SOA, by going deeper to a virtualized infrastructure first, is the unique thing."

Besides making IT implementation easier, the SOA environment also helps Woolbright to map business value back to IT assets-greater speed to market for new products and systems integration, lower costs through asset reuse, increased availability and scalability, and security that protects information and runs over a wide variety of languages and platforms.

For instance, using the SOA environment, Synovus over the past year has cut third-party-processor expenses by $1 million. SOA also keeps costs down by effectively extending the life of legacy systems, not simply "ripping and replacing" old systems. But it also readies Synovus for replacing legacy systems when the time comes.

Synovus, of Columbus, GA, has had a strong run of late. Second-quarter earnings grew 6.5 percent over those of second-quarter 2006, to $162.8 million. Return on assets for the quarter was two percent and return on equity was 16.7 percent, compared to 2.1 percent and 18.5 percent, respectively, over last year. (MS)

Return to top

11. ORACLE

What's driving innovation: A bonanza of keen acquisitions, like Agile Software and Bharosa, as well as a majority stake in i-flex
Noteworthy: It formed the Financial Services Global Business Unit in June to garner more FSI market share

Customers: 8,500 FIs, including the world's top 10 banks

In the world of innovation, it's not always about what a company creates that builds a reputation, but also the intelligence and foresight it shows through addressing an area to improve upon and then acquiring the best tools to achieve the goal.

Oracle has been a Goliath in the acquiring world, and with a June establishment of its Financial Services Global Business Unit, it strengthened its already solid position in banking, insurance and capital markets.

The new unit provides an infrastructure and an application platform for its cornerstone ERP and CRM services to the financial vertical, plus delivery from its toybox of product acquisitions like Siebel, Hyperion, Stellent, Tangosol, Agile Software and, most recently, Bharosa. Another key provision is the core-banking offering from India-based i-flex solutions, for which the Larry Ellison-led company has obtained a majority stake.

"If you looked at Oracle a few years ago, it was a very strong infrastructure-technology company, database, etc.," explains Rajesh Hukku, Oracle svp and general manager for its Financial Services Global Business Unit and chairman of i-flex Solutions. "Oracle has looked at the next phase of growth, they have clearly identified certain vertical industries where they want to be more value-added."

In fiscal 2007, the California company generated $17.9 billion in global revenues, up $3.6 billion from 2006. It has dropped more than $25 billion for acquisitions in the past three years.

"This is a transformation process where we are going from a very strong, robust horizontal infrastructure kind of technology to business applications, to very vertically specialized industry applications," he explains. "We have created a strategy of going and acquiring one of the best companies in [each] area in terms of domain expertise, etc., rather than building it all ourselves."

The gem in the empire is i-flex's FLEXCUBE open-architecture core system, which launched in the U.S. this year. Bart Narter, a senior analyst with Boston-based consultant Celent, says i-flex garnered greater "street cred" by fusing with Oracle. "With all those assets, they know banking broadly and deeply," he says. "When you own a core-banking system, you are in the heart of the bank, so they just bought one of the most quickly growing ones in the world."

With its full-court press in the finance world, the company has found better ways to provide extra scale for its clients. "You can introduce new products very quickly," Hukku says. (TM)

 

Return to top

12. JUNE YEE FELIX - GM, global banking solutions and strategy, IBM

Education: Summa cum laude graduate
Claim to fame: ORX, an operational risk exchange
Noteworthy: Her range spans mobile banking, risk, Basel II compliance, wireless and more

Pick a topic, and it can be almost any IT topic that affects banks, and June Yee Felix will be right in the middle of it.

The general manager of IBM's global banking solutions and strategy is a five-tool player, a driving force behind a team that's producing software and strategy that touches on payments, risk, wireless and a variety of other bank IT segments. From Basel II compliance to reaching the unbanked in Indonesia and providing wireless banking in Africa, the University of Pittsburgh grad is keeping one of America's oldest companies near the top of the curve.

Take ORX, an operational-risk exchange. IBM was recently selected to be the analytical agent for ORX, and is working on an external database that dozens of the world's largest banks will be using as part of Basel II compliance efforts. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Deutsche are part of a group of 36 banks sending loss data to Felix's team at IBM for crunching and analysis. "You need a third-party database to compare losses by business units," says Felix, who anticipates the participation of more than 50 banks globally in the next year. "So you can reserve the right amount of economic capital. This has big implications for banks around the world."

In almost every corner of the planet over the past year or so, one will find the fingerprints of Felix's group as an enabler of financial innovation. The firm has partnered with Visa to develop a mobile-payments offering widely used in Europe and Africa. And in yet another initiative, a new piece of software aims to "clone" a bank's best salesperson or customer-service rep, studying his behavior to help a bank develop best-practice scenarios for sales, service and customer acquisition.

The activity has made a difference on the bottom line, as IBM's total revenues grew seven percent in third-quarter 2007, with global technology-services revenues up 13 percent. "She has a deep appreciation of both the impact that technology can have on business process and solutions, and the fact that technology is an enabler of growth," says Carl Abrams, the financial-services sector business manager for IBM's research group, who also says she has a unique ability to never losing sight of the future while maintaining strong financial performance. (JA)

Return to top

13. PANINI

What's driving innovation: A growing demand for remote deposit capture
Notable achievements: Opened MICR testing and qualification center to advance standards in low-speed MICR reading in distributed capture
Customers: SunTrust Banks, Wells Fargo, JPMorganChase, US Bank, KeyBank, BB&T, First Horizon, HSBC, Northern Trust, Compass Bank, Merrill Lynch

More than 4,000 institutions have added remote-deposit- capture services on the commercial-banking menu. Why they did so at this time seems to be a curiosity, since the average bank has deployed RDC seat license to just 38 clients. Take out the aggressive promotion from the top 10 banks (like Wells Fargo), and that number drops to 19, according to figures from research firm Celent.

Much of the slow movement last year was attributed to scanner-equipment shortages, but an underplayed reason were unknowns of how RDC fits into a small-business banking relationships. How many monthly check items make it worth the equipment cost? And how is exceptions handling worked into the mix? Panini North America, already a hardware staple in check processing at two-thirds of top-100 U.S. bank back offices (with 200,000 units sold globally), is bridging the deployment gap.

Panini has expanded its product lineup with last year's introduction of the single-feed MyVisionX SD scanner and a new market strategy this year to fish in smaller ponds where checks are counted in the dozens instead of the thousands. "Small business is really the next frontier in distributed capture," says Doug Roberts, CEO of Panini North America, "and [banks] want to be able to offer a simplified device for a lot less cost."

Whether seeding the RDC growth or resulting from it, the small-office features are coming just as the demand for distributed capture catapults. Roberts, who joined Panini in 2002, says Panini's orders for December are expected to be four times higher than in September, and will boost to six times the fall figure in January. "Panini has significantly invested in marketing, sales and R&D," says Celent senior banking analyst Bob Meara.

While privately held Panini, a 13-year-old subsidiary of the Italian parent that pioneered the desktop check scanner, does not release revenue figures, officials confirm a 139 percent jump in 2007 revenues, following a 50 percent growth in 2006. (GF)

Return to top

14. MIKE COTE - CEO, SecureWorks

Need something more to scare you about illicit, overseas hackers? SecureWorks CEO Mike Cote and his firm have discovered crooks are gaining risk management skills.

Take a $150,000 online theft from a U.S. bank that Cote's company probed recently. Not only did the fraud ring scrupulously avoid lifting any Social Security numbers after gaining entry, which would have tripped mandatory alerts to account holders, but the perps had the confidence to re-enter the bank's network after the looting was over to see how much was stolen. "They wanted to ensure the money that the guys on the ground here in the States gave back was the appropriate amount," says Cote, 46.

Cote (pronounced CO-tee) and the computer specialists he hires are paid to sniff out these types of attacks, but he can't help but acknowledge the brilliance of a dark art. Curiosity of the dark side keeps the firm one of the premier white knights in the managed security services game, preventing unwanted intrusions, monitoring internal network devices and tracking emerging phishing threats from around the globe. "What's important to us is that our analysts and employees continue to grow in security knowledge and in an understanding of what's happening from the threat landscape and threat perspective," says Cote. "What is the other side doing?"

SecureWorks, which has more than 1,800 clients in banking, utilities and healthcare, spends up to $2 million annually studying Internet security flaws. It has become one of the industry's prime resources for identifying new attack schemes, like a faux dual-authentication signup deployed against customers who thought they were enrolling in their bank's multi-factor solution. SecureWorks shares many of its findings, including news that nearly 40 percent of phishing attacks are targeted and, in 2007, attacks on banks shot up 81 percent. Cote hit the prime time when he appeared on CNN in 2004 to discuss the Sasser worm that forced Delta Air Lines to cancel flights and knocked Agency-France Presse off of its satellites.

The privately held company, in which Cote and all employees share equity, is on pace to see revenues jump from $23 million in 2006 to $42 million in 2007.

Insiders and observers say Cote's client-centric focus is his crucial contribution to SecureWorks. He encourages his research-savvy execs out of the lab and into client offices. He also organizes client advisory board sessions in which feedback builds security wish lists and springs new product ideas. An example in banking: the launch of automated network compliance reporting.

Independent Bankers Association of Texas Services President Ramona Jones, who's toured Lone Star banks with Cote, says his strength lies in his ability to speak across areas of IT specialties at the bank for their unique security threats. "Mike was perfect in those interviews," Jones says. (GF)

Return to top

15. PETE CITTADINI - CEO, Actuate

Age: 51
Motto: "Innovation or death."
52-week stock growth: 65.14%

Pete Cittadini's motto - "innovation or death" - may be a bit over the top to some, but it is more than appropriate for the revolutionary world of open source. And in Cittadini's view, taking risks is what defines great innovation, and seeds a company for future success and investment. "It's a recognition of reality," he says. "If you stay stagnant in the next three to five years, you won't be attractive to shareholders."

His company's solution is based on open-source technology from the Eclipse Foundation's Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project, a nonprofit, vendor-neutral open-source community that Actuate founded and co-sponsors. BIRT surpassed the one million mark in downloads in July. Using Eclipse BIRT as its foundation, Actuate's products allow Web reporting and analytics to be added to Java applications, giving companies the ability to create interactive reports.

While BIRT is a three-year-old product, Cittadini has been busy this year taking it to new heights. Leveraging BIRT, Cittadini unveiled a new business model in August that's a hybrid of a traditional enterprise-software company. The objective is to bring enterprise-reporting software to a larger market and group of developers, which, in turn, will lower financial institutions' total cost of ownership. "We're not a pure open-source play, it's a new model," says Cittadini of the hybrid. "We want to change the market for enterprise software." A second initiative, the BIRT Exchange, a resource dedicated to the BIRT developer community, was launched in September to allow developers to find support and service options for BIRT as well as products designed to make BIRT more flexible. Customer self-service reporting applications have attracted the likes of Citigroup, Deutsche Asset Management, HSBC, JPMorgan and Mellon because they integrate data in real time from multiple transactional customer and legacy systems and combine analysis tools.

Under Cittadini's guidance, the company has seen record-setting financial results. Total revenues for the fiscal yea of 2006 were $128.6 million, a 21 percent increase over the prior year's total revenues; annual license revenues were $46.9 million, a 27 percent jump over 2005. This year, revenues for the first six months totaled $66.7 million; license revenue amounted to $26.1 million-a 23 percent increase over 2006. Non-GAAP net income for the first half of 2007 totaled $8.8 million-an increase of 63 percent over the first six months of 2006. (JA)

Return to top

16.ACTIMIZE'S EMPLOYEE FRAUD SOLUTION

Biggest advantage: Ferrets out internal fraud, still the industry's most nagging problem
Number of users: Nearly a dozen undisclosed banks in U.S., UK and Middle East use the employee-fraud system, which ranges in price from a few hundred thousand dollars to more than $1 million
Client Inroads: Lloyd's TSB is the only announced customer thus far

If a peer-reviewed study published this summer by Actimize is right, half of all financial services firms in the U.S. believe they are catching barely half of internal-fraud activity. "That's what jumped out to me, with regard to customer-data theft," says Paul Henninger, who as fraud director of New York-based risk-management specialist Actimize is usually accustomed to finding dangerous leaks in banks' data-protection systems.

Henninger was also surprised by the average peak loss of nearly $880,000 in suspected insider-fraud events among Actimize's customer base, which includes six of the top 10 global banks plus eight of the 10 largest U.S. brokerages. Working together with bank customers' compliance and fraud investigative specialists, Actimize earlier this year launched an Employee Fraud Solutions package to analyze workers' activity in relation to customer transactions or bank-fund movement.

The company, which was acquired this year by Israeli-based customer-interaction-analytics firm NICE Systems ($500 million in annual revenue), has staked an early market position in internal vigilance software. More than a dozen large retail banks in the U.S., UK (including Lloyd's TSB) and the Middle East have installed or are testing the Actimize tool. Three of them are among the five largest U.S. banks.

Actimize CEO David Sosna points out that insider-access-fraud tools are usually focused on protecting data, but there's also the never-ending parade of workers or managers who raid accounts or bank funds through legitimate access privileges.

Many employee activities that Actimize traces could be linked to policy violations or suspicious transactions and would, in isolation, probably not set off alarm bells in siloed fraud-detection systems. Actimize's tool works in a case-management setting, in which accumulated alerts can pinpoint early signs of potential fraud. "Banks have very complex systems, multiple channels, multiple products [and] multiple access points for employees," says Avivah Litan, vp and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Without good auditing systems, it's tough to monitor all the possible exceptions and anomalies."

Nearly 75 percent of banks in the poll rated the industry's defenses against internal fraud in a range of between "poor" to "somewhat acceptable." Their suspicions are validated by statistics from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, which says staff-based fraud cases are up 30 percent since 2006. (GF)

Return to top

17. IDENTRUST

What's driving innovation: A revamped business model and a boost in interest due to growing security concerns among FIs
Noteworthy: More than 1.5 million digital certificates issued to date. Approved by the Department of Defense.
Clients: RBS, Citi, HSBC, National Bank of Australia

IdenTrust began promoting digital certificates long before Internet security became a household problem, but for years the bank-developed system languished with a faulty business model. "When Identrus was conceived, it was an idea before its time," says company CMO Andrea Klein, who promptly rebranded the company when she joined by adding a "t" to its name. With that, trust became an official part of the company's story.

It was a long time coming for CEO Karen Wendel. IdenTrust revamped its approach to the market in a way that now has corporate-banking customers demanding their bankers offer federated identity and security. So, rather than reinvent the digital signature, in 2007 the banks that over the years pumped more than $100 million into creating the proprietary framework that combines policies, legal framework, operations and technology for issuing trusted identities are finally getting on board and bringing with them critical mass.

So what Citibank, ABN Amro, Bankers Trust and others thought would be a great revenue producer in the form of digital certificate sales in 1999, has re-emerged as a mechanism for customers and banks to inject security and wrangle greater efficiency out of account-management operations. The banks that oil-giant Shell are working with to implement the IdenTrust framework include Citi, Nordea, JPMorgan, and ABN Amro; also bullish on the system is HSBC. Other large companies pushing the approach on their bankers include Danone Group, Merck and General Electric. "The issue here is if you're a huge multinational and dealing with 10 of the largest banks in the world and somebody on your staff is fired because they've committed some horrible case of fraud, you want to be able to communicate as quickly and consistently as possible," says Susan Feinberg, TowerGroup's wholesale banking research director.

Privately held IdenTrust won't release its financials, but its customers include Royal Bank of Scotland, Citi, HSBC, Standard Chartered and HBOS. (RS)

Return to top

18. Wincor Nixdorf's Bulk Check Deposit

Biggest advantage: Deposits dozens of checks without envelopes
Number of outfitted ATMs: 10,000 worldwide
What it costs: $0.40 per transaction, compared to $1.70 for envelope deposits

In the cultural vernacular, ATMs are still often regarded merely as "cash machines," a nod to what they used to be and what's still perceived as their primary function. Not for long. Wincor Nixdorf is turning that perception around in part by allowing bulk deposits.

ATMs have long accepted deposits, of course, but not with quite the level of automation and volume enabled by the German branch and point of sale software and hardware vendor. Its new ATMs allow consumers to deposit up to 50 checks and notes at one time, without envelopes, by simply placing their notes and checks though a single slot on the machines. The amount of paper is dramatically reduced, making for greater accuracy and reduced chance for fraud. The ATMs were developed and more recently expanded in function with the idea that people visit ATMs much more often than branches. "It's an important channel to get your message of convenience and customer experience across to the consumer," says Alan Walsh, vp of banking for Wincor Nixdorf.

The machines also tap into the demand among small businesses to create efficiency in the daily deposit of checks. "You're able to replace seven steps or so that go into making an ATM deposit with just one step," says Jonathan Velline, svp of ATM Banking for Wells Fargo, which has deployed 1,200 of Wincor Nixdorf's envelope-less deposit ATMs.

Wincor Nixdorf's advanced ATMs are part of a larger story of strong global performance, with consolidated net sales in fiscal 2006/7 exceeding expectations and rising 10 percent to $3.09 billion from $2.8 billion. In the same period, profits climbed 33 percent to $157 million from $117 million, driven primarily by growth outside of Germany and strong results from the retail banking sector. (JA)

Return to top

19. NCR

Self-directed banking options are more expected than ever by customers. At NCR, answering that self-help mandate gave way to slew of product moves in 2007 that delivered many self-service products to banks and a lot of money to NCR's balance sheet.

A number of self-service and branch-automation upgrades were sandwiched around the June release of firm-commissioned research revealing that nearly 80 percent of U.S. and Canadian consumers said they'd be more likely to do business with organizations that offer self-service, with another 92 percent saying they value combining mobile devices with the Internet, ATMs and kiosks.

"People want more control of their interaction with your business," said Bill Nuti, president and CEO of NCR, at the time of the release. "Why wait for assistance with transactions they can more quickly and easily do for themselves at guaranteed quality?" As if to answer that question, NCR's action in its banking division included the introduction of products like Branch Assist, which combines self-service with teller transactions; a collaboration with Intel to add Intel's dual-core processors into NCR's ATMs and POS terminals to make assisted and self-service transactions run faster and smoother; and a reseller agreement with MShift mobile banking to enable banks to provide consumers with 24x7 access to online banking via cell phones, PDAs and other wireless devices.

"The thinking is, 'How do we enable our [employees] to have a more important level of dialogue with our customers?'" says Brian Bailey, a vp in NCR's financial-solutions division. "It's not just about tech implementations."

NCR's first customer to deploy Branch Assist, First Citizens Bank of North Carolina, uses it to manage customer flow during peak hours. "Our initial interest centered around elevating the service level we already provided for customers at our busiest offices. In practice, we found that wait times are substantially reduced," says Doug Sprecher, svp of branch channel administration for First Citizens Bank. (JA)

Return to top

20. mFOUNDRY

What's driving innovation: Designer-friendly platform for mobile apps
Noteworthy: Easily updated, transparent, downloadable mobile-banking application
Customers include: Citi, First Data

You can't get much larger than the two clients Drew Sievers and his mobile-application firm, mFoundry, landed this year: Citi's the largest bank in the world on any given day, and First Data is the world's largest provider of merchant processing.

What's just as compelling as the names-and the increasing belief that the curtain's raising on a new day in mobile-phone-based finance-is the mFoundry code under the hood. The Sausalito, CA-based firm's created tools that developers can use to create all kinds of services. "We solve the problem differently. We didn't start the platform to be a financial-services platform. We started the platform to solve the problem with mobile applications," Sievers says.

The average mobile phone carries more computing power than a PC from a decade ago, and an ongoing challenge is how to unlock that power in a way that consumers want to use it. The iPhone grabbed a lot of attention this year, but, for now, it's a $299 design item. For years, developers have been talking up WAP or modified Web designs to get consumers to use their phones to get on the Web. But why bother for a slow connection that's hard to navigate, has security issues and costs an arm and a leg?

Using downloadable, customer-ordered apps that reside on the phone is the next wave, and it's this approach to the market that is making 2007 such a memorable year for mFoundry and bringing it success in the financial sector. Sievers' firm formally launched mBanking, a mobile-banking application, at the start of the year; by April, Citi Mobile was rolled out in southern California. That momentum helped mFoundry land First Data in August.

Having one code base for developers meshes well with the J2ME, BREW, Symbian, BlackBerry and host of other runtime environments at play in the mobile landscape. That means fewer compatibility issues. "The bet that mFoundry is making is that the capability of Web applications remains low for a long time still, and that the difficulty of Java persists, leaving a gap for them to slip into. Not a bad bet," says Mike Rowhehl, a Silicon Valley mobility-systems designer and entrepreneur who knows the mFoundry team. Paul Ruppert, a mobile-industry consultant, says its cross-platform, cross-carrier approach allows financial institutions to create customized applications that run consistently on different kinds of devices. (MD)

Return to top

21. VSOFT

What's driving innovation: Speed to market; scalable links between clients and banks' back offices for check payments
Noteworthy: Its work with NCR and Diebold on image-enabled ATMs
Customers include: Bank of Tennessee, SunTrust, Cathay Bank, Farmers National Bank

One of the burgeoning financial-technology businesses of this early century is handling vestiges of the last one, in the ongoing shift to digitize the 98 million-odd paper checks that American consumers write every day. With one leg in Georgia and the other halfway around the world, the imaging and data firm VSoft is making a name for itself not with glitzy solutions, but by becoming a checkpoint at the community level in all the discrete points of presentment.

The firm's new COO, poached from Metavante in early spring, figures VSoft's success in community-banking industry and data centers is creating word-of-mouth momentum. "Checks are captured at multiple points-in the branch, at the teller, behind the teller, in the back office, inside an imaging-enabled ATM," Vijay Bilakrishnan says. "The evolution of VSoft addresses all these remote points of capture as well as extending applications further into the back office."

In other words, VSoft is on the move. This year brought two points of interest-one is the creation of a digital dashboard so that bank clients can have an overall view of what's going on using VSoft data on check presentment at branches and cash machines. The other is a partnership with Diebold, which matches one the firm has with NCR and allows the firm's software to integrate with Diebold machines built with check-imaging capabilities. Now VSoft clients which use the Diebold machines can speed automated deposits and further automate ATM-balancing workflows.

VSoft clients range from the $571 million-asset Bank of Tennessee, the $3.3 billion-asset Middlesex Bank of Massachusetts to $180 billion-asset SunTrust. But it may be that wiring the small-town bank is where things get interesting, being that there are still 8,000 banks in the country.

"VSoft's solution has completely changed the face of our one, little branch," says John Charette, vp of finance and business technology at the Independence Bank of Rhode Island. "We've greatly increased our reach to include five states, which has increased our core deposits by over $6.5 million. Because of these results and because of how simple it is for our customers to open remote accounts with us, we have no need to build any other branches."

For VSoft, these kinds of results mean growth-the private firm has doubled in size in the last two years and brought in revenues of $11.2 million in 2006. (MD)

Return to top

22. WSFS

What's driving innovation: The need to improve workflow
Noteworthy: An average 15-minute customer address change now takes only 90 seconds
Key factor: Going from hundreds to 30 custom scripts simplifies interactions.

WSFS Financial Corp. executives are spoiled: They can't remember when a customer's address took more than 90 seconds to change. But it did: Before the Wilmington, DE, savings and loan customized the workflow-management engine of its contact-management system, it would take up to 15 minutes to accomplish that simple task. Since these issues involved 75 percent of the bank's service requests, these requests were no small disruption.

The problem, according to Cheryl Hughes, vp and director of transaction services, was that the scripting tool's dropdown menu of Metavante's Enterprise Contact Management's system was "very robust," offering too many options. So the team trimmed it down to 30 custom scripts to more easily capture delivery requests at branches and call centers and send them directly to the correct fulfillment center. "You had to know about the way things were done here; you had to know the language of the bank," she says. "But now it speaks in the language of the customer."

Previously, the tool required the completion of seven fields-at minimum-including the type of product and department that would process the request, before a request could be filed. Occasionally, the associate had to delay processing the request while he hunted down the answers. Now, all requests are practically instantaneous. "Now associates don't have to understand the inner workings of the fulfillment area [to process a request]," says Lisa Brubaker, svp and director of retail administration.

For example, Hughes says, if a customer wanted to stop receiving paper checks and have the bank retain them instead, the associate would have to know the customer's account was a deposit account, which group performed that task and whether the request was a priority or not. "Now the branch representative doesn't have to hunt through long dropdown lists on big menus," she says. "They just check off a few things. We have 200 branch associates who are customer-facing and we had 200 ways of doing things."

Mack Wood, vp and general manager of Metavante's consulting and professional services, points out that most clients require customization of whatever product they buy. "Often, customers may not understand the full functionality of a product and how it can improve their business," he says. (KK)

Return to top

23. VERINT

What's driving innovation: Need for workforce optimization
Noteworthy: Acquisition of Witness Systems and quick release of upgraded branch automation and new back office solution
Customers: 21 of top 50 banks in U.S.

There are 1.1 million tellers and bank sales people in the U.S., yet banks know precious little about how well or poorly their tens of millions of daily interactions with customers are going. Verint Systems is working to change that by transferring the best automation technologies from the call center-a uniform customer experience, data gathering, time management-and applying them to branch automation and workforce optimization.

As Darryl Demos, general manager of Witness Enterprise Solutions group, a division of Verint, puts it: "Having a consistent customer experience and optimizing the interaction is now more important than ever." But right now banks have almost zero insight into the quality of that face-to-face interaction, except for customer surveys after the fact.

To this end, Verint acquired Witness Systems in May to give the company greater scale and create the leading provider of workforce and enterprise optimization solutions. Back in November of 2006, Witness launched Impact 360 Retail Financial Services, combining the best of Demos Solutions and Exametric, which Witness had purchased in October of 2006. It helps retail banks automate time-consuming forecasting and scheduling; predicts customer demand; delivers real-time customer and productivity information to managers; tracks and analyzes performance against goals; and delivers e-learning materials to staff. Then, just last month, Verint launched a major upgrade to the Impact 360 for Retail Financial Services product and added a new product, Impact 360 for Back-Office Operations. Now, the company has one overarching platform, called Impact 360, which can handle the branch, call center and back office automation.

There are currently more than 70 banks using Impact 360 Retail Financial Services for branches. That includes nine of the top 10 U.S. banks. So far some of Verint's customers have enjoyed solid success with the product. SunTrust Banks, for instance, increased sales per full-time employee per day by 200 percent by realigning schedules to focus on sales. Another customer, Wells Fargo, can now predict transaction volumes at 3,000 branches with 92 to 95 percent accuracy, helping it meet customer service requirements. (MS)

Return to top

24. HARLAND'S CREDITQUEST

Number of users: 45 banks
Biggest advantage: Combines analytics and workflow tools to streamline the commercial lending process
Upshot: It can reduce multiple systems down to one

Combining workflow tools with analytic tools is what makes Harland Financial Solutions' CreditQuest so appealing to banks looking to streamline commercial lending. So far, it has enticed 45 banks, including Ionia, WI-based Independent Bank Corp., Walla Walla, WA-based Baker Boyer Bank, and Orlando-based Seaside National Bank. Its appeal: It can reduce multiple software systems down to one.

CreditQuest streamlines the commercial lending process at banks, which often entails as many as 12 different IT systems that are not integrated with one another, says Harland's Mark Little, vp and general manager of global risk solutions. "Unlike consumer lending or mortgage lending, which is much more efficient, commercial lending is still very labor-intensive," he says. Instead of reducing the mountain of paper that is produced in the commercial lending process, many banks have simply bought yet another system to track all the paper.

Patti Hines, an analyst at TowerGroup, says commercial lending is the last remaining area at banks to be automated. The consumer and mortgage businesses have been so busy in recent years that most of banks' IT attention has been geared toward automating those higher-volume businesses. Now, with improvements in technology and volume declines in those consumer lines, commercial lending IT is finally receiving more attention, with a special interest in eliminating those manual steps, she says.

While a number of other products available can boast of helping banks with collaboration of internal systems, CreditQuest differentiates itself with the addition of analytic tools, Little says. Being able to determine the precise effect of interest rate changes, or prepayments, on the overall cash flow of the bank-on the same system that manages the workflow no less-is a powerful lure for a bank, he says. (LC)

Return to top

25. BOTTOMLINE TECHNOLOGIES

What's driving innovation: International banking
Noteworthy: STP integrated in its cash management platform
Customers: Fifth Third, UMB

Globalization means doing business agnostic to currency and language. And over the past year, Bottomline Technologies has been enabling international bank transactions as well as anyone.

It's cash management platform, Global Cash Management, was boosted in December 2006 to include straight through processing capabilities aimed at making bank transactions seamless and secure.

The bottom line on Bottomline is that 17 banks and financial institutions are now using the product, 16 of which have assets greater than $30 billion-a roster of clients that includes Bank of America, UMB Financial, Fifth Third Bancorp and a large Asia-Pacific firm which the tech company would not identify. These firms are all on the frontlines of international commerce, and that means navigating the inconsistencies that can arise from one international jurisdiction to another, including not just language and currency, but legal and security grey matter that can leave cross-border cash management hamstrung before it can get going.

"From a payments perspective, we're a one-stop shop for a bank that wishes to do all of their global payments through one platform and their all banking information through one platform," says Eric Campbell, CTO of Bottomline, a New Hampshire-based firm that employs 560 people and had fiscal year 2007 revenues of $118.3 million. The product's won raves across the industry, with firms such as Celent, Financial Insights and Aite Group singing it is praises in recent analyst reports.

One user, UMB, offers a Bottomline-powered business banking service, Web Exchange, to its corporate clients. These clients are now able to achieve instantaneous account transfers online, generate customized payment status reports in real-time and use new self-administered security controls. Another institution, Fifth Third, has deployed the platform's wires functionality to more than 10,000 users across its banking center network to automate wire initiation, foreign draft creation and check distribution management processes, reducing manual labor by about 30 percent. (JA)

Return to top

For reprint and licensing requests for this article, click here.
MORE FROM AMERICAN BANKER